Duplicate Meta Titles and Descriptions Issue in Google Webmaster Tool

[akshaydesai]

Hello All,

We have one site named http://www.bargains-online.com.au/ & have some categories along with filter option on left side like filter by price & by brand, ect.

We have already set rel canonical tags on all filtered pages, but still those all pages showing duplicate page titles and description warning in HTML Improvements section in Google Webmaster Tool.

For Example:

http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners.html

We've set rel canonical tag on below pages.

http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners/l/manufacturer:black-eagle.html

http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners/l/price:2,100.html

http://www.bargains-online.com.au/pressure-cleaners/l/price:3,100.html

Kindly request if anybody has any solutions for the same, please share with us.

Thanks,

Akshay

[donford]

Hello Akshay,

I looked at this particular page and variations of them and do correctly see the rel="canonical" tag.

You should note that the Google HTML improvements will only change after they rescan your site. It is not immediate, and depending on Google's crawl schedule. Meaning they crawl some sites minute by minute while others may not get crawled but once a week or longer. If you have fixed the problems Google recommends, on the next update you should see the results.

A few other things you may want to look at while you're in there.

Title Tag (Too Long)
Meta Description (Too Long)
Keywords Meta Tag (useless)

Title Tag: 72/70 Easy fix remove the "space" at the beginning and replace the "space-space" with a comma.
Improved fix: Rewrite the title tag. "pressure" and "cleaner" is used 3 times in the title (See Rand's post back in 2008 for an example)

Description Tag: 248/150Fix: Re-write the meta description tag see Moz's Description tag lesson.

Keywords Meta Tag. This tag is useless, no search engine you want sending you visitors actually pays attention to it. It also tells your competitors exactly what keywords you're targeting.

Hope this answers your question and beyond,

Don

[hectormainar]

Hello.

This is a common problem for us working on ecommerce. Every filter, ordenation widget and any other options you give the customer to browse your site on a more comfortable way, becomes a pain in the ass with the duplicated content for search engines.

Apart from implementing all the canonical tags as you say you did, you could also take a look on removing as much parameters as you can in Webmaster Tools (specially those dealing with ordenation or number of items shown). At last, you should also decide if you want to avoid bots from indexing those special filter combinations so that you can focus on the categories page. You give the example of pagination, but also filtering by manufacturer. The option we take, and which I think is the better, is to add a "noindex" meta tag to those kind of pages, and only indexing the main page in each category. If we think a filter is important as a keyword (for example, "adidas soccer boots" for category "soccer boots" and brand filter adidas), what we do is create an special description for that page so that it is no longer duplicate content: if we are not able to manually create that description, we just add the noindex tag as I said before and we forget about that page on search engines.

[MattRoney]

Hi Akshay!

Do you know whether Google has indexed your site since you added that canonicals? If you're not sure, you may want to resubmit your sitemap in Webmaster Tools and see if that gets them started.

[akshaydesai]

Hi Don,

Thanks for the tips and advise, you have in deed answered the question and gave some good insight.

[akshaydesai]

Hi,

Thanks for sharing your ideas I think it does make sense to add "noindex" to the filter pages I guess we can do away with those important filter pages as that is what causing us an issue.

Thanks again

[akshaydesai]

Hi Matt,

We did resubmit the site about 4-5 days ago and I guess we will update some stuff as per advise from the other 2 responses and wait and see if Google picks it up.

Thanks again for your help.